Phazon Burns
by Xman797
Summary: At the end of the Phaaze war, two hunters find themselves stuck together in a final bid for their mutual survival, as they hide from the federation. Neither of them has any intention of staying hidden forever, nor to back out from their respective goals. But to achieve them they'll need to learn to deal with each other first. (Cover art by HanageMissile on twitter)
1. Chapter 1

A/N : This is a work of fiction based on the Metroid franchise, whose exclusive publishing rights belong to Nintendo.

With special thanks to USEChairman for his invaluable work as my beta-reader, and whose one-shot "Bonded by Blood" was the spark that would eventually give birth to this story.

* * *

Phazon Burns

Chapter 1- Unlikely Remedies

_"Most people tend to see organic life as chaotic, illogical. But it IS logical. _

_Its logic is merely based on only two principles: survival, and reproduction._

_The first, is absolute. The second, necessary._

_Both of them exist to satisfy the single law that life and nature impose on all things equally: _

_Evolve, adapt, or perish and disappear."_

\- Unit 6O364-B,

Introductory discourse to the Mechanicum Ethica

* * *

His cough was getting worse.

As his ship exited warp speed and the gray, barren planet finally came into view, he found himself wiping red and luminescent blue spit on his gauntlet again, the shields of his federation commando armor sizzling briefly as they vaporized the sickly fluids.

He didn't have much time left.

He let the computer calculate an entry vector into the planet's atmosphere, entering the coordinates of the Hunter's last known location, obtained through an officer that still owed him a favor and had been on monitoring duty in the small observation station in the system.

As the planet steadily began to grow closer, he caught his reflection in the cockpit of the small gamma strike fighter.

He did not look good.

His skin was pale, his angular face gaunt after several days with little to no sleep. His jaw was still clean shaved, though that was more due to his particular brand of illness rather than regular shaving, a luxury he would have had little time for anyway. His short black hair hadn't grown either in the months he had already spent running. As for his eyes... his eyes were practically glowing at this point, a striking, electric milky shade of blue having replaced his usually dull one.

A tag on the left of his standard PED marine suit read the name of Andrew Starosk.

He ignored the sensation of wrongness the name gave him, pushing back the grating sensation that there was something that he should be remembering.

He straightened himself as he initiated the planet entry protocols and subsequent landing sequence, shutting down the red notifications warning him about the radioactive dust storms blowing on the surface.

He re-materialized his helmet as the small spacecraft began its bumpy descent.

Looking at the readings on the HUD, he realized that he probably wouldn't have enough fuel to get out of the system.

No matter. This was probably a one way trip anyway.

Following the Hunter's tracks had been both his best and his last shot. The best he could do, at least, without landing himself in a containment cell and, quite possibly, on a vivisection table.

Besides, as a medical commando, he had enough training and experience to diagnose himself.

The phazon in his body had rendered him immune to its own negative effects, such as the intense radiation that conceivably should have cooked his body from the inside out, and reduced him to a melted pile of flesh and hazardous matter.

No, he mused, he would have no such easy death.

He once more tried to filter his blood through the suit's systems, and sighed internally as it flashed its red denial, and again administered the recommended painkillers.

No, the blue, half-mutagen, half-radioactive substance thrived in his body. A million of microscopic tumors inside would constantly produce more of it, and in turn, a million more would transform a small portion of it into whatever his body demanded.

The rest would wander freely into all of his system. And it would keep doing so. Slowly. Deeply, attaching itself to proteins, cells and everything else. Too deeply for a PED to safely extract, or for his system to process.

And it would keep doing so, slowly weighing him down, until his blood vessels either started bursting from the pressure or clogged themselves entirely. And trying to activate his own PED had already ruptured a few.

_'Thank god for whoever implemented emergency abortion protocols'_, he thought.

After several minutes of a bumpy flight and steady deceleration, the ship made its landing on the planet's dusty ground, where an orange Chozo ship had been a mere day ago. He shut down the ship's systems and got up from his seat, walking to the air-lock and picking up his energy rifle on the way, committing to his self-imposed mission for survival.

There was only one species in the universe that could take it out of him now. And of that species, there was only one known individual resilient enough to have possibly survived the explosive end of the Phaaze war.

The most dangerous one of all. Of course.

Metroid Prime, the one who took the guise of the hunter's dark doppelganger.

The wraith in the shadows of so many emergency briefings.

Code name: Dark Samus.

Finding it meant either a quick death or, far less probably, stabilizing his condition. Telling anyone about attempting to find it, and essentially feeding it his fatal surplus, meant an assured condemnation for high treason. Probably crimes against sentient species, too.

He knew that most of this plan was desperate and stupid, but he was out of options, and each time he so much as thought about deviating from said plan, a pain strong enough to feel like his head would split in half overtook him, until he either got back on track or collapsed from it.

Something else was compelling him forward. Something beyond his own will to survive, yet very much aligned with it.

He stepped on the dust-covered surface of the gray planet and closed his eyes, reaching for that faint, buzzing sensation that he could feel whenever there was some concentration of the blue mutagen nearby.

He smirked joylessly, picking up a near imperceptible trail. Had the war still been raging, he would have almost certainly been his squad's best hunter. Or he would have gone insane. Probably both. And again, that was supposing he didn't end up on a dissection table at any point before that.

He shook his head, focusing back on this lead to his objective and started walking.

He just hoped that whatever he had "smelled", so to speak, wasn't a sizzling pile of ash with some phazon residue. Or a perfectly fine Metroid Prime waiting for him with open jaws.

A lot of bodies ended up as sizzling piles of ashes in the wake of both hunters, when there was even anything left at all, that was. And he had no intention of dying this particular way. If he could help it.

His boots left deep indents in the dust as he began to walk forward. He had been lucky to land while there was no storm to batter the landscape. He doubted he could have gathered the focus necessary to track his mark otherwise.

He pressed a few controls on his wrist computer, and watched as the ship began its lockdown procedure, the four, teal colored, beetle-like hover-wings digging themselves into the ground as the ramp from which he had just descended retracted back into the ship.

Shouldering his energy rifle, he made one last check on his condition, and then the condition of his ship, before preparing himself for the long trek ahead.

With one last deep breath, he started walking.

* * *

After about a quarter of an hour, according to his chrono, and several stops to cough, and consequently swallow a few mouthfuls of radioactive, phazon-laced blood, he finally spotted what could very well be his mark's hiding hole.

"Hole", he thought, was an appropriate name for what stood before him. He scanned the area, picking up the way the rocks had been melted and blown away from the rocky outcrop.

This had been the entrance of a cave, and what had collapsed it had obviously not been a natural event. He closed his eyes again, focusing again on the buzzing feeling, wanting to make sure that this was the right place, and not waste whatever time he had left before the next storm.

Because, of course, this hellhole of a planet had to have near unpredictable dust storms.

Pushing the thought aside, he finally found what he was searching for. The feeling was stronger. And it came from somewhere downwards, behind the pile of rocky debris.

As he opened his eyes, his HUD informed him of an incoming storm, which, according to calculations, would hit him in about two hours and a couple dozen of minutes.

He sighed. _'__Speak of the devil, and he'll come breathing at your neck.'_

Nevertheless, moving the timer to a corner of his vision with a thought and readjusting the energy rifle on his shoulder, he set to work.

_'Really'_, he thought with a sigh, starting to lift the first stones out of the way, _'__I should have brought a shovel.'_

* * *

Digging himself a path through what remained of the tunnel entrance using both his suit enhanced strength and energy rifle took him most of his allotted time, punctuated by fits of coughing and heaving.

He was trying his damnedest to retard the moment where he would be forced to remove his helmet an empty the bloody contents of his stomach. There was just enough oxygen in the air to breathe, and by this point he was pretty certain the phazon would keep him alive through whatever this world could throw his way.

That did not mean he wanted to experience what it felt like to have his lungs shredded by dust, and still live afterwards. So, he kept on digging.

There was barely ten minutes left by the time he finally managed to open up a passage wide enough for him to crawl into. Not enough time to go back to his ship, even if he started running. The thought brought a wry smirk that tugged his lips upwards.

_'Well'_, he thought, _'__fucked if I don't, still potentially fucked and fucking the galaxy with my shitty idea if I do.'_

He kept smirking as he started crawling through the dark opening, lit only by the dim glow of his HUD.

_'Boy, do I love my chances__'_, he thought sarcastically, switching his optics to night vision.

It took a bit of contorting and scraping to squeeze through with his weapons, the rifle on his back and his sidearm getting stuck several times in the narrow passages and uneven ceiling, but after a minute or so he was standing again. He took a look around, noticing the faded footsteps on the ground that led deeper into the dark corridor.

He started following the tracks, taking care of leaving marks of his own on the rocky walls at each turn, in the eventuality that he would have to find his way to the exit without his equipment.

Some turns and a few drops later and he reached what must once have been the lava conduit of a small volcano. Cautiously, he took hold of his rifle. This was the place from which the resonance came from.

What he saw didn't bode well for him.

The cave in which he stood was large enough for five men to fit side by side, and the ceiling was high enough for him to jump comfortably. But on the walls were scorch marks. On the floor, splatters of familiar pale luminescent blue made a haphazard trail behind a corner at the bottom of the cave, which seemed to be continuing deeper.

He slowly made his way downward, following the patches of blue on the ground, until he was past the corner and into a smaller cave that the one he had just came from.

The hairs on his neck raised as he took a firing stance, advancing slowly and cautiously as he entered a narrow corridor, where the splatters became dragging marks on the ground and walls.

He could almost see his target's movements as it had struggled to even keep itself upright, a clawed handprint of blue lying on the floor a bit further in, right next to the indents where its knees had probably failed it.

Another, vaguely triangular, indent in the dust showed where it had likely used its weapon to try propping itself up again, the luminescent handprint appearing again around an outcrop. Phazon still dripped down from the stone, as it seemed to have cut deep into its flesh while pulling itself up.

He kept on walking, slowly, following the trail with the sights of his weapon as it jumped from one wall to the other, more evidence that his mark had more staggered forward than walked through there, doing so on whatever it had left of strength.

He hugged the wall as reached the end of the tunnel, the mouth of yet another natural cavity partially hidden by another outcrop. The buzzing at the back of his head had become a thrum, the splatters and marks only led into one direction.

His goal was right around the corner.

He stood back to the wall and took slow, deliberate breaths as he prepared to turn around the corner and face what it hid, calming his nerves and getting his head into the game.

He took in one last sharp breath and brusquely entered the cave, prepared to instantly shoot down any potential threat, crouching behind a rock on his right and using it as a cover in case it retaliated.

What he saw stopped him right in his tracks, his face scrunching and his breathing stopping as he witnessed the bloody, luminescent blue mess on the opposite wall.

There, inert, hunched over, one hand covering a gaping hole in its armor, laid a figure he had only seen in a few classified holos and pictures.

He had found it.

The one the space pirate had aptly named the Dark Hunter.

And, impossibly enough, weak, and still alive, according to his suit's warnings.

He didn't realize he had let go of his rifle until its clatter on the stone cut through the haze of his staggered mind, startling him as the thrumming at the back of his head became an incessant and thunderous beat that pounded at his thoughts, melding with the adrenaline in his system, his body going rigid as the sound reverberated like the crash of thunder.

He stood there for several seconds, frozen, his eyes darting along the lone figure in front of him, afraid of making the slightest noise and rousing the wounded beast, the slow lifting and dropping of his chest as he breathed and calmed his heart the only movement in the dark stone room.

Ironically, said breathing would be the first thing to break the stillness, as a violent coughing fit forced him to curl forward, nearly making him kneel in pain.

When it finally subsided, and his heaving breaths became the only sound in the cave again, he was almost surprised to find that no deathly blue energy shots had been fired his way. With a quick glance to his sensors, he found that the energy readings in the cave hadn't spiked the way phazon-based weaponry usually would make them.

In fact, they were actually lowering. Very very slowly.

He closed his eyes and checked for the buzzing feeling again, feeling like a cold hand was slowly wrapping around his heart. It too was dimming.

His mark was dying.

Blindly, he reached out for his riffle, picking it up with one hand and holding it loosely as he slowly crept up from behind his cover, the professionalism honed by years on the battlefield finally retaking control as he swallowed silently and squashed the dread that was forming in the pit of his stomach.

A part of his mind already sifted through his experiences in field medicine with humans and other species, already putting together the beginnings of a diagnostic based on what he knew and could observe from there. And it was not an optimistic one.

He took careful steps as he approached, shutting down proximity and hazard materials warnings as he did so.

The closer he got to the black figure, the more the extent of the punishment it had endured made itself visible.

Everywhere across the organic looking alloy, cracks spidered. In the places where those did not already spread, the armor was chipped and scratched, and dimly luminescent pustules protruded from the black material, forming an organic net that seemed to struggle to keep the bulges from bursting.

He stopped as he saw a fragment of the black armor on the ground, his eyes tracing the distance between it and the jagged hole on the figure's lower stomach.

The material seemed burnt around the edges of the blue wound. Whatever the Hunter, because he could not imagine anyone else encountering his mark and living, had hit the creature with, she had done it at point blank range.

Why had she not finished her dark doppelganger off was a question he may, quite literally, not have the time to ponder.

As he reached it and crouched, a change occurred. Barely a blip on his monitor, but to his new "sense" it was much, much more perceptible.

The Dark Hunter was awake.

Barely so, devoid of the energy required to move, or so much as look at him, but awake, and aware of his presence.

Somehow, he managed to quell his apprehension. His returning cough wracked his frame once more, helpfully reminding him of what he had come to do, and why.

With his chest still reeling from his violent convulsions, he crouched down before the soon to be corpse, setting one knee on the ground as he tried to ignore the sharp pain that was starting to pierce through the fog of the painkillers.

Shakily, he reached for the portable medical isolation field on his utility belt with his free hand, setting the small cubical object on the ground and listened as the device quietly hummed to life.

With minimal dust hanging in the air, the force field that erupted from the steel cube had no problem quickly sanitizing the air, and creating a small, circular shield to protect those within its borders, the edges of which could be seen at the mouth of the cave and down the small tunnel on his far right, which probably led further underground.

Without artillery or beams raining down on them to drain its energy, the tiny device would last them for years. Decades, if they took breaks to let it recharge.

A small part of his mind coldly reminded him that "they" was no longer him and his squad mates, but rather him and the dying husk of the most dangerous being that the galaxy had ever known.

With the field set, he began really assessing the damage, his eyes scrutinizing the damaged armor and what it revealed of the creature underneath with a frown on his face and sweat on his brow. Up close, and with proper lighting the wound looked even more severe, the flesh seeming to have been burnt to the point of melting.

He was by no means an expert on heavily mutated, phazon infused, Hunter reborn metroids, but all field medical officers had to have a xenobiology degree on top of their medical one, and he had spent enough time killing and containing phazon metroids to know how resilient they were. And what little was needed to heal them.

He let his rifle fall on the ground again as another fit suddenly wracked him, one hand flying to his mouth while the other reflexively gripped his chest. Dimly, he was aware of the Dark Hunter moving, imperceptibly so. The same buzzing feeling spreading to his whole body. Somehow, It had smelled the phazon in him, and was trying to reach for it, impotently so.

He was more than happy to oblige it.

With one last look at his sensors, which indicated nominal levels of oxygen and no harmful pathogens and dangers in the isolation field, aside from the very obvious one, he dematerialized his whole suit, leaving him in the gray, military, form-fitting under-suit.

What he felt without the protection of his defensive gear, was the mind of a starved, wounded beast. Barely coherent, prisoner of its dying body and grasping with reckless abandon at all it could to keep itself alive. And hunger was what kept it alive, the phazon in his now glowing veins what it was reaching for.

He watched the hand lift from the jagged wound and begin to reach towards him, slowly, jerkily, the hole in its torso revealing an expanse of dark bluish liquid with a few red and pale, milky blue veins floating under a mostly translucent skin. At the bottom of it, he thought that he could see a shape, against the black of her outer shell, something that looked like a spine made of the same hell black material, with the addition of luminescent blue scraps and cartilage where what looked like the joints where.

As his heart started hammering and the clawed hand got closer, he saw that Its palm was in a similar state as the hastily healed wound, lacking the black armor and allowing him a view of the black scrapped bones from which those claws extended, along a few vessels, and what looked suspiciously like the remains of a dead eye. It seemed as though It had been taking material from there, cannibalizing Its outer shell to regenerate its inner one.

Slowly, almost blindly, he shakily unzipped the upper part of his under-suit as the hand kept approaching, exposing the skin of his chest and arms to the warm air, heated by the field. Swallowing his fear, he crept closer to It, grabbing hold of Its wrist and slowly guiding Its hand to his heart.

Then Her "skin" met his.

His scream echoed within the cave as She began to feed. And She was ravenous.

He had no idea at which point "It" became "She" in his head, and he was far past caring. The sensation of having the mutagen forcefully pulled from all over his body at once was _not_ a pleasant one.

Had he not already been keeled over, the raw _pain_ of feeling an immeasurable amount of particles pulled like jagged, twisted and rusted nails from his flesh, from every single one of his base components would have brought him crashing and spasming on the ground.

Yet as brutal and excruciating as the suction of what had been both slowly killing him and keeping him alive was, it did not last.

Soon, his body had nothing left to give, and he unceremoniously crashed down on her, his head and torso hitting her hard armored side with hoarse and ragged exhale, his weight too much for Her weak push to hold back.

He laid there with eyes wide open, raspy breaths escaping his lips as he struggled to feed air to his body, the aftermath of the torture rendering him completely uncaring of the fact that his head was resting on the shoulder armor of a stirring predator.

And awake She was. At the back of his mind, where the phazon had resided, he could now feel _something_. A cold calculating mind, that slowly reined in the ravenous beast from a mere moment ago. Yet still, the hunger was there, controlled, for now, but still yearning.

He had little time to ponder over these sensations.

Without the mutagen to fuel his body, the accumulated fatigue of his many sleepless nights was suddenly catching up on him. Fast. He tried to fight it, the soldier in him screaming than falling asleep on Her shoulder was probably one of the fastest ways in this galaxy to meet his grave.

With pain slowly receding from his senses, he grasped on the feeling of the hard, partly-organic, partly-metallic armor that bit into the exposed skin of his chest and cheek. He tried focusing on the light smell of ozone and snow that was so typical of phazon and oxygen mixing together.

Though the jumble of nonsensical thoughts, and as sleep began to claim him regardless of his efforts, he did notice that the smell that came from her was a bit different than regular phazon. More alive, more organic somehow. And though he couldn't tell if it was just the delirium speaking, he found that, for some reason, he kind of liked it.

_'Not a bad perfume to die to'_, he thought with a pained smile.

His last, strange, conscious thought was that her hand was the softest thing he had ever felt.

Then everything faded to black.

* * *

In the dark, nearly silent cave, stillness slowly retook its rights. For a moment.

Slowly, jerkily, the Dark Hunter's head moved.

* * *

The cold, sharp blue light of her thin, triangular helmet lit the pale skin and hard flesh of the human pressed against her right armored side.

Her hunger was nowhere near quenched.

The Blood she had pulled out of him had been enough to bring her back from the brink. Yet, she had once been the most powerful creature the Blood had ever born, nurtured by its very source. This was nowhere near enough to feed her. Barely enough to even heal her.

She turned her cool gaze to the cracked wound of translucent bluish membrane on her midsection, where the sharp edges of her hell black outer shell were still fused into her hurriedly, painfully made inner one. She sat there for a moment, studying, through this broken window in her body, the glowing blue flow of the Blood and the red shadows of the human life-fluid in her vessels.

She was in no hurry anymore.

Her strength would return, the human would see to that.

She turned her gaze back to him. Already, slowly, she could feel the Blood filling his veins again.

The Blood was an intrinsic part of her being, the cornerstone of her rebirth, and thus she was far more attuned to it and its will than many other beings. For the Blood did have a will. The blue essence was a single mind which carried and changed all which it touched. And said will, though incredibly simple and basic, could make itself incredibly strong when it was threatened.

Survive. Spread. Reproduce.

This had been the reason why she had needed the human construct to control the Source in the first place. The Blood had no other wills than these. Time was meaningless to it. So too was why or by whom it was used, even if it was against its own self.

She painfully tried to lift her arm-cannon, succeeding only by a few inches before its weight dragged it down again, preventing her from blasting the human away. Her current state was too critical for her to gather enough energy for a shot.

She tried anyway.

_'What an annoyance'_, she thought, her blue gaze thinning by an inch on his sleeping face, studying the angular features of his jaw, the slowly receding bags under his eyes and the absence of anguish or pain in his expression, _'__Like the human. Like their construct'_.

Aurora Unit 343. Binding herself to it had proven a near fatal mistake.

Yet still, she lived. Even after her Blood sister had found her again, weak and defenseless. Even after she had left her to die there. Denying her own hypocrisy. Their common nature.

She had no illusion that it was the Blood that had pulled her again from the grasp of the void, the same way it had pulled the human to her.

She inspected him, with the same cold mercilessness a predator would look at a defenseless prey, trying to find out where it should tear flesh and muscle first to get the most meat out of its future meal.

He was well built, scars littering his back telling of several years of battles against more than one enemy. Under her stuck palm, she could feel a strong heart, and the million of seeds that the Blood had gifted him.

She cocked her head to the side in detached curiosity. The Blood had already started to flow through his veins again, in a similar way her own flesh-born strain had in the hunter's bodies. But where hers had flown wherever their life-fluid had, his was burying and digging in every base piece of him, slowly clogging and choking his essence, and with it, the means to produce more of itself without killing its host.

That would not do.

With what little energy she had to spare, and what little of the Blood he had got back, she slowly tried pushing her will onto the seeds. The light of her gaze dimmed as she focused on the shape and idea of one of the Source's Seeds: wide maws and long claws digging into the rocks, consuming the very flesh and essence of this world, bloated pustules and veins churning with torrents of Blood for her alone to feed upon, the shape of the human breaking and deforming into her design.

What she felt in answer would have sent her old, incomplete self into a mindless rage.

Her present self just glared at the human with cold hatred, willing the worthless pile of flesh to be shredded apart from the inside out.

The Blood denied her.

More specifically, it denied her harm to his shape, to his design.

She could feel his strain unclogging from his essence, the seeds and Blood in him restraining themselves to all that flowed and could spill out of him, yet through the same restraint, kept him dependent on her particular brand of feeding for his essence not to drown. Or his body to burst at the seams.

This was not what brought on her contempt. Not even was it the fact that the Blood had made him a Seed that was meant to move, flee, or hide among those who had come close to killing it. A seed that much more acted as a prey than as a hunter.

No. It was the reason implied by the denial.

It was the fact that he was made _her_ Seed.

And _she_, was his_ Guardian_.


	2. Chapter 2

Phazon Burns

Chapter 2 - Wake Up Calls

_"The art of self alteration is nothing new._

_From primitive rituals, to therapeutic hypnosis to the modern synaptic remappings, we've always strived for means to redefine ourselves, to erase that which was impractical._

_However with the advance of technology, and the recent affairs of espionage involving the use of artificial personalities, the federal administration is considering the application of severe restrictions on the uses and commercialization of such technology outside of the psychiatric medical field._

_The complete list of these restrictions will be presented to the parliament in five weeks (Universal Time Units)."_

\- The Daily Tech, Issue #96587

* * *

He came to consciousness slowly, and painfully.

_Very painfully_.

His eyes snapped open as he let out a sharp scream, the very same pain that had ruthlessly sent him to a blissfully numb blackness bringing him back to the land of the living with matching brutality.

The same burning feeling of a palm on his chest tearing something from his body jerked him awake and backwards as his sight struggled to gain focus, the blurriness fading away to reveal a cold, unseen gaze, piercing him through the triangular slit of blue on the black helmet of the cave's other occupant.

His first reflex was to scramble up and away, his legs uncoiling from under him like a spring. Years of training and fighting made him put as much distance as he could between him and the dark huntress, his body instinctively taking a firing stance as his hand flew to his sidearm and pointed the barrel to her head, neglecting the riffle that was still at her feet and now out of reach.

His eyes darted from her slowly lowering palm to her face, the adrenaline piercing through the fog of weariness as his heart pounded in his chest.

The air coming in and out of his lungs in labored breaths was the only sound that could be heard in the dimly lit cave. His body stayed tense, his senses hyper-aware of her every move as her hand calmly, almost lazily, finished its descent.

There was a current in the air, an electrostatic feeling.

The same grating feeling that he could feel whenever he gazed upon his name now buzzed incessantly in his head, as if his body was desperately trying to draw on instincts that were locked just out of reach, his body lightly twitching as it tried to push him to action, but failed to decide which one.

All the same, something in his guts, in the raised hairs on his neck told him that, even still as she was, this was no longer a dying soon-to-be corpse. In its place, what he felt was a fully awakened predator who could, and would, throw him around like a piece of dead meat if she wished to.

Somehow, sitting back and seemingly relaxed against the rock wall, she managed to look more immediately threatening than a Space Pirate berserker charging at full speed. Yet there was no movement from her part. Not even the rise and fall of the chest that most breathing creatures had. Just a deathly, silent stillness, and the feeling that she was scrutinizing him from behind that thin, pale blue visor of hers.

She slowly tilted her head to the side, either amused or curious at what she saw, getting an involuntary twitch of his fingers in response. As the moments passed and still nothing happened, he finally began to consciously register what his panic sharpened senses were telling him.

One, he was tired as hell, and while the adrenaline coursing through his veins could probably keep him up long enough for him to fire a couple of shots and find a hiding place deeper in the caves, he knew his limits enough to know that his present state wouldn't get him very far. Two, he felt... lighter, better. Like a small weight had been lifted from every part of his body, and stopped playing flipper with his cells.

A quick look at the being in front of him told him what that weight might very well have been, and where it had likely gone.

It was subtle, but she looked... healthier, if you could say. His eyes darted alongside her figure as took notice of the changes. The glow from her visor seemed a tad brighter, most of the ugly blisters that had been there and here on the surface of her dark armor had resorbed, the pale light seeping from its collection of cracks had dimmed. Partially hidden by her arm-cannon, the wound on her stomach now looked less like burst entrails and more like badly cauterized, mostly translucent skin, through which he could glimpse either her muscles or organs looking more consistent, more solid.

He blinked once, then twice, trying to push back the fogginess that was coming back in his eyes. His ears registered the sound of his own heartbeat, his own blood rushing through the vessels in his body. That's when he noticed it.

Something was tugging at his mind, pulling his attention and his gaze towards the veins on his still naked chest. He planned to only take a quick glance downwards. What he saw made him pause a few seconds longer.

His veins were glowing blue.

But those few instants of inattention during which his eyes barely had time to slightly widen proved his initial wariness both justified and insufficient, as the dark hunter suddenly bolted forward with inhuman speed, propelling herself from her sitting position with her free hand raised and rushing for his throat.

By the time his brain acknowledged the danger and pulled the trigger, his back and head had already hit the rock wall, the stone digging into his bare back as the plasma from his missed shot illuminated the cave and the pale light of her visor, now inches from his face, lit his features. Her iron grip muffled his startled shout as blurred instincts overcame reason, his hands letting go of the weapon and flying for her arm and elbow, in a move that was designed to dislocate his aggressor's articulation.

That would've worked, if said elbow hadn't been armored. He mentally cursed himself, the death grip on his throat keeping him from uttering a single sound as he tried to get a hold of the weapon again, only for her to kick it at the other side of the cave.

He raised his leg in an attempt to kick her off in return, re-engaging the lower half of his armor through his neural interface. However, before he had the chance to do so, She started leeching the phazon out of him again, the startling pain interrupting him mid-move.

This time it felt less like he was being shredded from the inside and more like liquid fire was being poured through his veins, coming from his extremities and rushing towards her hand. That included feeling like his head and heart were about to simultaneously burst and shrivel while their contents was being forcefully siphoned, tearing a strangled grunt from him as his face contorted in pain and anger once more.

An entire marine's life worth of obscenities flew through his mind in at least six languages as he felt his grip on his consciousness start to waver again.

Black spots began to appear in his vision as the pain started to blind him again, and it took him several tries before his foot finally made contact with her leg, which, while it did make her buckle, still wasn't enough to make her let go, to his increasing panic and frustration.

A fist to her wound, on the other hand, swiftly brought her to the ground with an annoyed growl, sounding more like static on a radio than a voice. Yet her grip remained as unshakable, the weight of her armor dragging him down to his knees with her as he could feel himself getting to the edge of unconsciousness again.

In a last ditch effort, he blindly tried to find the sleeve of his under-suit with one hand, while the other was promptly and violently pinned to the ground by her arm-cannon, stopped right in its tracks from dealing another blow to her still healing wound.

But the distraction was enough for him to slip his arm in up to his shoulder, the nanobots in the suit automatically moving to help his fingers pass in the glove and sealing the smart material against his skin. With a flash his arm was again covered in armor and he lost no time in quickly raising it and bringing it down, aiming for where he thought her wound was with his fading sight.

However, for every ounce of strength and speed he lost to the air withdrawal, his captor gained two, and she quickly shifted her body to avoid the enhanced blow, his fist crashing fruitlessly against her armored side.

A last panic fueled burst of strength let him hit her two more times, with the same results, before blackness took over once again.

* * *

With one last pull, her Seed finally returned to unconsciousness.

Yet she didn't let go, even as she started to slowly pick herself up, using her arm-cannon to prop herself up on one knee again, uncaring of the hand still pinned under it. She raised and kept her impassable gaze on his face, coldly, methodically draining him of all the Blood coursing through his being, stopping just short of depleting his reserves completely and tapping into his life essence.

Not that the Blood's Design would allow her to, anyway.

The Seed was usually the one who lured and nurtured a Guardian, and as such, so long as she didn't endanger his life essence or impeded the Design, she would be free to reap as much and as often from him as she needed. Conversely, she would be will-bound to defend her Seed against all mortal harm. Pain was of little consequence to the Blood, even coming from its propagator. Nevertheless, had any other being attempted to do to her Seed what she had just done, she would have been forced to become its shield, regardless of her current state, or chances of success in defending him.

Only because the Blood in his veins acknowledged the fact that she neither would nor could endanger him was she not met with the excruciating pressure that would have forced her to stop, or fight the potential threat to the death. Deep below the coldness of her mind, the primal part of her being raged at being chained to what by all accounts should have been a pawn, a withered corpse or carrier for her Strain, bent to her design.

But she wasn't a primal being anymore, and while at no point did she had the desire or need to deny her nature, her mind was still the one in charge. And that fire was soon quelled by the cold knowledge that that yoke was as lenient as it was irrepressible. Pain, after all, was of little concern to the Blood. Only what one perceived as threatening through the filter of its Design and its connection to the base components of the universe would be treated as such, and nothing else. In extreme circumstances, a guardian could cannibalize and kill its Seed, if it meant the birth of a new Source.

That had been how she had evolved, when the Progenitors sealed her and her original Seed away, on her birth world.

She moved herself closer to him, pushing him against the rock wall once more, placating his back to the hard material. She released some of the pressure from her grip, no longer meant to drain and suffocate, but merely to hold him in place, as she probed at his Design with her will. She searched for the way he was meant to propagate the Blood, pushing back against his Strain, physical contact making up for a control over him that she was clearly not meant to have.

Now that she had the time and energy to focus on something else that her immediate survival, she could see his Design more clearly. His role was not to attach himself to a planet and stay bound to it until it became another Source. Rather, he was a propagator meant to pave the way for the seeding, gathering enough raw material to create a core, an ersatz Seed that would then slowly sink to the heart of the planet, gaining in mass as it did and leaving him, the real Seed, free to move on and quickly create other cores on other planets.

She tilted her head in appreciation. This, at least was a welcome change, for it meant that even in her diminished state, she wouldn't be bound to a single location. Provided that she dragged her Seed along with her. Later on, once she fed and restored herself to her full strength, this wouldn't even be a concern. Her immaterial form would allow her to travel instantly back to him, regardless of the distance or obstacles, and the bond that linked them would allow her to perceive as he perceived. But for now, she was weak. And the hunger was a constant distraction.

And so she kept searching, looking for the practical means by which he was supposed to propagate the Blood.

Finally, after some time and far more coaxing of his essence that she should have needed, she had results.

She watched as thin, pale blue tendrils emerged from the outline of where his bare skin met stone. Through him, she could feel as they began to eat at the raw matter, the Blood slowly flowing back into his veins as it made more of itself, feeding its host and storing the excess in his system.

She waited just long enough for him to reach an equilibrium before she started to feed again. The pure energy of the Blood trickling through her palm and her body made her fingers twitch with want, her ravenous state even more obvious now that she was feeding herself breadcrumbs, and she had to consciously pace herself to avoid violently draining him again.

Yet she didn't let him spread too much of the Blood either, for there was another reason to her feeding: she couldn't afford to be found. Not now. She had been aware of the human station orbiting the planet when she'd first materialized on it. Even though the memory of her arrival had been blurred by the sheer pain that putting herself back in a somewhat stable from had caused, she had been able to feel them. Faint life essences dancing in the periphery of her senses. Yet she had paid them no heed, counting on the radioactive storms to hide her from them and her blood sister, and nourish her back to a state where she could hunt again.

She had been mistaken. On all accounts.

Yet she lived.

She looked down, studying the slowly closing cracks in her armor, and let out a mirthless laugh, shoulders slightly shaking as the inhuman sound reverberated in the emptiness of the cave.

She had survived. Again.

And she had nothing left. Again.

Somehow she found it funny, a silent laugh making her shoulders shake lightly. As funny as the mending, slightly translucent blue membrane of her inner shell looked as it smoothed itself, taking the shape of defined human abdominal muscles. Muscles that she should not have needed. Muscles that were useless to her Kin.

She took in a breath, the movement useless to her beyond the centering effect she found it to have, another thing that she shouldn't have needed, and let the calm coldness take over her mind again. She recognized the withdrawal and hunger slipping past her guard when it did. She had been its slave for most of her conscious existence by now. She wouldn't go back to this. Not anymore.

The Source had freed her from it, and this gift she did not intend to waste.

Taking and releasing another unneeded breath, she closed her eyes and focused on healing herself as best she could. Mending her outer shell would take more time than the few seconds she had needed for her inner one, yet already she could feel the living metal start to close its gaps, its own senses adding themselves to her own, keeping her appraised of every inch of progress it made.

Her neon blue eyes opened again, scrutinizing the human, her Seed, still placated to the rock wall by her unwavering grip. His features were clearer now, without the haze of the hunger. She could see the light sheen of sweat on his pale skin, the irregular twitch of his eyebrows and the sometimes erratic movement underneath his eyelids as whatever dreams she had forced him into assailed him.

The living metal awakened in her sight at her call, but it was still too weak to speak to her mind coherently about the finer details of what it perceived, beyond her own state. What it did say she had already had an inkling to. That once it had healed, her outer shell would hide her from the human's constructs and senses, provided that she did not use the powers of the Blood for anything else than concealing herself. That her Seed's ability to make more Blood would regulate itself and grow to its full potential, regardless of her feeding, revealing their existence and position in three planetary rotations at the soonest.

That the essence of her three chosen still coursed through her.

This gave her pause, her hand letting the human's face loll slightly forward as her attention was fully drawn by what she had just learned.

Several seconds passed as she focused on the flow of her own strain. At first they were hard to distinguish, drowned in her own essence as they were, but she could feel them now. Three essences absorbed in their entirety, floating like filaments in the now much dryer river of her own. The only three beings beside her blood sister she had deemed worthy of sharing her strain with, her Blood.

The Ice-Maker, the Half Construct, and the Shapeshifter.

Hunters, like her. The only ones to stand against her, the only ones to stand beside her blood sister.

Appropriating herself their abilities in full, augmented by her own, was something that she could do without any supplementary cost, and would gain her as much of a boost in power and tools for the hunt as her second rebirth had given her. Yet the living metal showed her the same thing that her own senses had perceived throughout her inward inquiry. Trying to meld more than one of them at once or not waiting the time to properly and gradually integrate them to her own essence, without the support of the Source, would likely result in her destabilizing herself. Permanently this time.

It also informed her that the optimal path to full recovery allotted her little choice in the matter of the order by which she could do so.

She moved closer to her Seed, her breastplate nearly touching his bare torso, and slid her arm-cannon under his knees, using it to lay his legs flat against the ground, and blocking them by kneeling on them, removing any chance of another startled leap after his eventual wake.

The Half Construct would be the first, she thought. His essence speaking the most to her outer shell, and necessitating very little change to her core beyond the knowledge she would gain from it. His complete melding and the refractory period that would come with it would not take more than one planetary rotation and a half in total.

Then would come the Shapeshifter, which would probably take more than one planetary revolution, during which she would have to gradually learn to stretch and bend her own essence into that of others.

And last would be the Ice-Maker. Ice and cold were the only fatal weakness of her Kin, as such his essence would be the hardest and longest to meld to her own, provided that she did not regain the Source before getting to this stage.

Settling herself for a long wait, she gave one last look to the imperceptibly slow shrinking of the hole that let her abdomen show, and resumed feeding.

* * *

This time, he did dream.

Of the boot camp on Orinan III, of the days spent training and learning field medicine, either in simulation rooms, in the tropical forests, deserts or ice fields that made up most of the planet's surface. A harsh set of climates which made it an ideal place to break the recruits in on a number of extreme environments.

He recalled the first contact training, the Xenopsychoanalysis courses and the bizarre, randomly generated creatures and cultures their drill sergeant would stick them with. He recalled John Feldings, the ever eager man that had joined in with hopes of becoming one of the first to interact with a newly discovered civilization, yet was still fascinated by humanity's old myths and culture.

He dreamt of his fifteenth assignment, of the terrified look on Clara Laqshiz's face as a space pirate blew a hole through her armor, and the reinforced glass behind. Of the sound that her flesh and bones made as the void mercilessly crushed and sucked her from inside out, spreading her mangled remains outside of the enemy frigate.

He dreamt of battlefields, in space and on dozens of planets, of his promotion into special forces, of Feldings's retirement to live with his wife, becoming a consultant in Xenobiology for the army. He caught glimpses of the women he bedded, all marines, most of them human, some from other species. Glimpses of brothers and sisters in arms, from every fronts and every race.

Yet he paid little attention to most of those memories, because all the while he could feel that something was wrong. Something that was there, right before his eyes but kept eluding him with the fickleness of the dream.

Voices blended together, bribes of sentences too muddled to be made sense of. Yet there was always a name which kept coming back.

Simons.

\- _Hey, Simons ! Wanna come get a drink ?_

Uxyal Simons.

\- _Simons ! Get me that cauterizer ! She needs it, now !_

Those were his memories.

\- _Uxyal Walter Simons ! Get down from that rock right this instant, or stars help me ...!_

But that wasn't his name.

\- _Uxyal ? That ain't no human name, is it ? Ya got alien blood in those veins ? Or is it ya were born in one of those "culturally interactive" settlements ?_

So why did it feel like it was...?

\- _Simons ! We're going to lose her !_

More memories kept blending together. Some distant and blurred, and others vivid and loud. Yet despite the unknown name, they all felt intimately familiar, like coming into his home, yet finding another name on the address and on the lips of everyone. And no one seeming to care about it.

\- _Sergeant Uxyal Simons, for your courage and valor during this crisis we award you..._

At the same time, it felt like the dream was unraveling his entire life, but by taking random frames every time and superposing them together, instead of doing so in sequence. Yet there seemed to be an order to the chaos. Like the dream was leading him somewhere along this memory line.

\- _I'm sorry for your loss Simons. If, you know, you ever need help, you know where to find me..._

He could feel it, there was something important that he needed to remember, something that explained why this name felt more and more familiar than his own. A particular memory, hidden among the black spots that he could begin to discern.

\- _SIMONS ! FOR THE LOVE OF THE EVER-FUCKING BIRD LORDS, DON'T YOU **DARE** LET ME GO !_

The time between the Salda mission and his assignment on the G.F.S. Olympus. A gap that he didn't remember existing. That felt as if it shouldn't be there.

\- _Get back ! Get back ! Sergeant ! They've got us flanked !_

Why was it there ?

\- _... Whole half of the squad got wiped out in the explosion, nobody will come search for them..._

What had happened ? What was that place ? Something about an experiment...

\- _... Excellent physical condition..._

What was it that he had concealed to himself ?

\- _... Only subject to survive the procedure with..._

\- _... aking Aran for comparison we..._

\- _... est mission shouldn't be hard to arrange if we can get Stölfer to shut up..._

\- **_HELLO..._**

\- _... rd to replicate as it is, might as well give him a codename and..._

\- _... 's waking up, prepare..._

**_\- ... SUBJECT SYLUX._**

The Salda Mission.

His squad.

Dr Levan Artid.

The proto-hunter initiative.

Uxyal Simons.

Sylux.

Like opening the doors of a floodgate while standing before it, his mind was swept away in the torrent of memories. Hot rage and hatred poured into his very being as he remembered every cut, every face as they came and left. Doctors, federation soldiers, the members of his squad, turned test subjects, as their bodies were carried out one after the other. Dr Stölfer's scheme to allow him to escape, the arm that he ripped off from him for getting them there in the first place, and cover both of their backs.

Months and years as a bounty hunter, amassing weapons, information and resources, trying to track down Artid, to find and kill every single person still linked to the proto-hunter initiative.

The Alimbic Cluster and its promise of absolute power. The battles against the other hunters, each one as dangerous and determined as he was. Spire. Noxus. Kanden. Weavel. Trace.

_Aran._

Gorea and the Oubliette. The feeling of being speared through on a deeper level than the material realm, and emptied of all strength. The long painful crawl to the Delano 7, his ship, as the sound of battle echoed behind him, stray beams flying through the room until the silence retook its rights. The staggered rush as the self-destruct sequence nearly took him before he had a chance to fly off.

The long recovery. More days, more bounties, more heads to lay down at the altar of his revenge, without a glimpse of the one responsible for it all.

And then, an opening. An opportunity. One that necessitated a constructed personality to exploit, authentic enough to pass through psych evaluation. His own. His past self, from before it all, anchored in truth and therefore undetectable.

One that would allow him access to a military database, unchecked by the contaminated Aurora Unit and reduced to human sentries. Sentries he was qualified to be a part of, with the right background alteration. There he had found what he had come for.

But then the plan had gone awry.

A space pirate attack. Flash of blinding blue as phazon was fired, disintegrating targets from both sides. A battle that saw him and a few marines emerge victorious, at the cost of being enlisted in the Phaaze offensive, a promotion that put him under the scrutiny of an ever-watchful and quite uncontaminated aurora unit aboard the Olympus.

Only thanks to the dying breath of Phaaze had he been able to conceal his escape. Too late. The damage was done.

Weeks of operations and exposure to phazon had cost him his current condition, and forced him to keep hiding himself under his identity as Andrew Starosk for far longer than he had to, causing the personality to embed itself deeper that what was safe for his memory, a fact which could likely explain why it was only now that he finally fully emerged, and only thanks to a stray figment of memory in a dream.

Now with most of his memory, and the personality construct finally gone, he allowed himself to get carried by the flow of the dream, letting it mend what it could mend, knowing that once it did, he would have to face the land of the living.

And a very uncooperative dark hunter.


	3. Chapter 3

**Phazon Burns**

Chapter 3 - Initial Friction

_"Whether it be for cultures, individuals, or, more commonly, opinions, having an opposing element against which to challenge them will always be beneficial. Both for the respective elements that are challenged, and the greater ensemble to which they belong."_

_"That, however, is not to say that one cannot completely overcome the other"_

_\- 'Wars in times of peace' _by Firace Tercess, Kriken Archivist

* * *

She felt something awaken in him.

Something that seemed to alter his very nature, independently of the Blood's influence.

She was still kneeling on his extended legs with her weapon still pinning his unarmored hand to the ground, while the other one laid limp on his side. Her own palm was still in a vice grip around his throat, drawing the Blood from the pulsing life-essence underneath. In the background, the dim light of the human's device and her own bio-luminescence shaped the shadows of their superposed forms against the uneven rock wall.

She tilted her head to the side in curiosity. That shift intrigued her, as it appeared to have had nothing to do with her own actions, nor the Blood's design.

She knew, of course, that other species had the ability to change forms, the Shapeshifter was a literal example of this, and that minds could be bent and reforged, as the Blood did to the weak. But what she could feel, and almost visually observe, was a being fleshing itself back out.

With little else than her slowly fading hunger and potential plans to take over the human station to occupy her mind, she welcomed the more immediate distraction, looking on as the eye movements of her Seed slowed, and his breath evened. His physical appearance seemed to change too, nearly imperceptibly so. Her eyes trailed along the expanse of naked flesh that spanned his left side, watching the movements of the nanoscopic human constructs as they seemingly returned her Seed to his complete capacities, and original shape.

Prodding through their mental link, and taking advantage of what little her strain had control over his, she coldly dissected the changes in his essence as it mended itself.

His muscles and bones strengthened, his mind and senses sharpened as dormant connections reactivated. Design viruses rewrote and reinforced every single one of his cells, infusing his immune system with the logic to break up any pathogens or foreign bodies, any potential disease or biological weapon he might come in contact with, granting him a near instantaneous immunity and weaponizing his life-essence. Culture of stem cells in the marrow of his bones multiplied, the surplus released into his bloodstream and collected by the constructs, ready to replace or craft any missing components.

All over him the army of nano-machines made a thousand more changes, reforging him from the inside out into a weapon.

Before her very eyes, the mind and body of a pawn morphed itself back into that of a hunter.

She pulled away from him, taking in the full sight of his naked upper body as he finished coming back to completion.

She kept on watching, both through her physical sight and her mental one, observing every change with the rapt attention one would have when witnessing the edge of their blade come into shape from a raw piece of metal; No angle was left unchecked, no change, regardless of how small, escaped her inspection. Only when the true shape of hunter finished coming into light did she allow herself a modicum of satisfaction.

It did seem like the Blood had chosen a somewhat worthy being as her Seed, after all.

Satisfied, the Dark Huntress returned to her initial stillness, turning her attention away from the human and to the voice of the living metal of her outer shell.

While her own wounds were now fully healed, her armor still sported a fist-sized hole that displayed the newly formed inner shell above where a human's stomach would usually be. Extending this newly formed protective layer, similar in form and purpose to what the humans called 'skin', and dissociating her entire body from her damaged armor, without losing her symbiosis with it, had been a task that had taken more time than she had expected.

This, in turn, had severely slowed the mending of the armor proper. Only now had the breaches on her stomach and hand started to close, a rectangle in the bottom right of her vision showing her both the status of the repairs and the results of her different inquiries into the suit's integrity.

Overall, the damage inflicted by her Blood-sister had been nothing less than crippling. Most of her powers would be unsustainable in her present state, and the armor wouldn't be able to ensure its full return to life until the gaps were closed. So far, only its sight and its memory had come back, her position, the path to the surface and a reduced modelling of their surroundings appearing in the top left corner of her vision.

Her weapon, on the other hand, was fully functional, the lines along its triangular edge pulsing with the power of the Blood, a power that she couldn't afford to use. Not with the humans, and more importantly their constructs, watching from their outlook floating in the void. She would have to wait for the Half-Construct to fully dissolve in her essence for her to be able to use his weaponry. An inferior one, to be sure, but one that would amply suffice for her current designs.

She turned her gaze upwards, focusing on the stone ceiling, ensuring that her armor's sight was truly functional by having it decompose the base elements of the rock that surrounded them, the results of her request passing by her eyes. She then looked down and to the right, to the discarded riffle of her Seed, and stayed focused on it as she kept on testing the sight on more complex and simultaneous demands, like asking for a detailed technical schematic of the weapon among other things, until she was satisfied. Only then did she turn her gaze back to her Seed.

That was when she noticed him start to awaken.

She watched him attentively, feeling him immediately become aware of her presence. His left hand twitched as his mind reigned in his first instinct, which had been to go for her throat and wound, even before he had opened his eyes. An action that would have been futile with most of his limbs still immobilized, but still made her wary of the arm around which he had managed to re-manifest his own outer shell, ready to dodge and rob him of the Blood again.

She could also tell that he could feel her watch his surface thoughts, a flash of indignation at the unwanted intrusion briefly passing through their bond, to her slight amusement, before the logical part of his mind coldly assessed the depth of their link and sifted through the possible causes and uses of it, finally disregarding it in the face of the more immediate physical danger he accurately perceived her to be.

Yet the thing she noticed the most was the absence of fear, even as he opened his eyes, his cobalt blue orbs stoically meeting the neon opacity of her thin visor. In its place, there was only the intensity of a cool analytical gaze, unwaveringly matching her own, and at the bottom of which she could see the steadfast embers of an old hatred. One that had been there long before they met, and had little to do with her.

Or so it seemed from what she has the time to glimpse from his errant thoughts, as he quickly took care to jerk her mind's eye away from the subject, forcefully focusing on his immediate senses, and briefly pulling her own with them. An offence that she had little care for, more interested as she was in his actual capacities, and resumed her unwanted inspection, his eye twitching once as he made his annoyance felt. To her utter indifference.

Along with the fear, so was gone the reactions of his mind and body to her feeding. The pain, while still coursing through his being, seemed to leave him indifferent and unimpressed, which, while she was not deliberately trying to torture him, was still not something many of the beings she had caught in her grasp had had the ability to shrug off.

Seconds passed as their unblinking gazes crossed each other in silence, the two hunters gauging and appraising one another.

The newly awakened human was the first to make a move, the hand not currently pinned down by a phazon powered arm-cannon slowly moving up, its armored glove stopping for a moment when a tightening of her grip on his throat reminded him wordlessly that she was the one in charge, and would swiftly send him back to unconsciousness should he try anything she didn't like.

Feeling around for their bond for a moment, he nonetheless acknowledged her statement with a small nod, wordlessly resuming his movement under her watchful eyes. His hand came to lightly tap two times the side of the wrist under which his throat was currently half strangled, before lowering it to the side of his chest, still not having completely grasped where her perceptions superposed with his, yet managing to convey the idea of a more convenient feeding point and the ability to communicate.

To her, it felt like a newborn trying to enunciate one of the progenitor's records.

She, of course, knew his species communicated mainly through noises, as most of her servants had. Yet their languages were childishly simplistic, compared to the tongue of the progenitors, and she usually cared little about what they said to her, so long as her commands were obeyed. Only the strong and her kin deserved her attention, and to both of them she spoke through the universality of the mind rather than the specificity of each voice.

That said, the strong among her servants had done little better than him when it came to answering her.

And her sister only ever had silence to give her.

But while it would be more convenient for him to speak rather than awkwardly throw his intent around in his own mind, she had no intention of interrupting her feeding for a weakling, a thought that she made known to him, the proper way, projecting her will and perception clearly, as she slowly lifted her chin once in an expression of both disdain and expectation.

This, at least, seemed to be something they were in phase with, as he took the thought in stride, his eyes slowly looking down on her arm, a feeling of validated expectation emanating from him as he briefly looked back up to give her a nod of acknowledgement before looking down again.

Under her watchful eyes, he calmly took hold of her armored wrist and began to pull her hand away and downward, the defined muscles in his arm rolling under his skin as he progressively invested more force in his effort to dislodge her unwavering grip. Not wanting to make this easy for him, nor intending for it to last more than a few minutes, she contented herself to maintain the same amount of pressure, letting herself being pulled back, but not opening her fingers either, the sharp claws of her gauntlet leaving quickly healing trails of blood on his neck.

She watched on as his mind sharpened, the sting of the effort passing through their bond as he commanded the constructs in his body to assist him in this purely physical contest. As he did so, she felt the flow of the Blood diminish further, blue motes floating from the surface of his skin to her open hand in the narrow space that now separated them. It seemed that while they had retained their original purpose, the constructs, now infused with the Blood, had become as much a part of him as his own flesh.

She felt a sliver of appreciation coming from him as he felt them draw on the Blood, progressively giving him the strength to contend with her own. Bribes of information and feedback answered his mental inquiries, as what had originally been a means of mending his own flesh, and manipulating it, to a lesser degree, made itself known as both a far more superior version of what it was, and as an interface between him and his own strain, similar in purpose to the devices the humans and her servants had used to channel the power of the Blood, if far more flexible.

With the Blood now powering his muscles, and her absence of retaliation, he began moving her hand away with more ease, the palm of her now nearly mended hand hovering an inch above the base of his throat, the scratches left behind by her claws disappearing before her eyes as he started dragging them down his chest, clearing his throat as he did so, yet not taking his eyes away from her arm, his expression still as stoic as when he had woken up.

This one-sided tug-o-war continued for a time, scratching the flesh from the top of his solar plexus, down his exposed pectoral muscle, and finally along his ribs, only stopping when her hand hovered an inch above where, underneath the skin and bones, the organ pumping the life-essence throughout his body beat with strength and calm. Only then did his questioning eyes meet up with her own again.

She waited a moment, before apposing her hand fully upon his skin, his own letting go of her wrist. The flow of the Blood from the surface was the same here than above his throat, her feeding resuming as it had before he woke up. She could even take further advantage of the situation, and dig her claws down, deeper into his flesh, feeding directly from his organ.

His regenerative capabilities seemed strong enough to allow him to survive the wound, provided he started actively fulfilling his role as a Seed, and began to spread the Blood in the flesh of the planet on his own. And in the case where he didn't, the Blood would stop her before she could incur any lethal damage to his essence, which would make it a good test of his viability.

The only real disadvantage she saw from taking nourishment in that position would that she would have to replace either her hand or weapon on his throat if she needed to choke him out again. A fact that he seemed to be conscious of, too, as while his hand was no longer holding her wrist, it still rested on the defined muscles of his midsection, his armored knuckles aligned with the wound in her outer shell, and close enough to her arm to quickly take hold of it if he needed to. He followed her gaze to said arm, and back up to her visor, keeping his face and thoughts consciously neutral and his body relaxed, waiting for her next move.

A mental picture, and the clear description of what she planned to do, and of what she expected him to do, accompanied by her claws applying just enough pressure to draw blood from his flesh were the answer she gave him, prompting a slowly raised eyebrow from him.

She patiently waited as she felt him test his control over the constructs in his body, the current flow of the Blood enough to keep the hunger in check and mend her wounds at an acceptable rate. She watched as his free hand closed and opened, and the look in his eyes changed to an interrogative one, his mind analytically asserting the risks, weighing the pros and cons, and at the same time inquiring about them, his attempt at communicating with her being messy again as a result.

She pointed her chin to the hand still blocked under her weapon, then laid back slightly to show the still not completely healed wound in her armor, the message clear, even without the addition of the concepts she projected in his mind : the faster I heal, the faster you'll move.

He thought for a moment, looking at her as he did so, but as he nodded his acknowledgment and was about to, again, throw his thoughts around in an attempt at communication, she interrupted him, and coldly instructed him to use the sounds he was accustomed to make, making sure to add in her perception of his attempts and the resulting aggravation they caused her.

He raised an eyebrow again, this time with a hint of amusement, which she cut short by making the start of her impatience know. Only then did he finally open his mouth, his baritone voice echoing through the cavern, reverberating against the walls.

"Well, then. Dig in." he said evenly, with a neutral gaze.

She did so with pleasure.

* * *

The wet snap of his ribs breaking cracked throughout the cave like a whip as the air left his lungs.

Teeth gritted, face strained, Sylux grunted, looking down at the wrist of the Dark Hunter sank down into his chest.

Blood splattered her armor and dripped down his exposed stomach as her fingers cut and dug through the soft tissue with ease, until he could feel her fingers enclosing around his heart, a half-cough half-grunt sending another flurry of scarlet and blue bio-luminescent droplets on her black chest-plate, as her fingers pierced his lung.

No sooner had the sardonic invitation finished leaving his lips than the humanoid metroid had angled her hand downwards and pierced through his body like a stake, pushing the air out of him. The pain while initially sharp, had quickly faded away, letting place to a mild discomfort, and the now phazon powered nanite colony, under his command, had quickly stemmed the outer and inner hemorrhages undoing what damage they could without sealing the foreign object in.

The feeling of tendrils digging into the stone behind him and dragging back the newly produced phazon into his body, which was immediately consumed by either his wounds or the hand currently buried wrist deep in his torso, wasn't a particularly nice one. The closest sensation he could compare it to was feeling the effects of a stimulant go through his body and immediately fade away with each beat of his heart.

Still, the fastest she healed, the fastest he would be able to regain the use of his legs. A voice at the edge of his mind told him that his newfound physical capacities may probably be enough to bodily throw the dark hunter off of him if he needed to, but he quickly discarded it. Even if it was true, he seriously doubted that she wouldn't realize what he was trying to do, and with her hand where it was, she would probably devour the phazon needed for that before it even had the chance to make it to his muscles.

A cold feeling of amusement, and what almost felt like a dare, at the back of his mind accompanied by a squeeze of his heart quickly brought his eyes back to hers. She had obviously heard the thought, and he didn't need a more explicit answer to tell him exactly how this particular enterprise would end for him.

He sighed in annoyance, swallowing again the blood and phazon in his mouth, distracting himself by observing the collection of small scratches on the opaque glass of her visor. Inexpressive and opaque as it was, he couldn't help but feel like the sharp angles of her helmet made her look haughtily down at him, a sentiment that she didn't seem intent on denying.

_'Well'_, he thought, looking down with stoicism at the intruding hand, _'The good news is that if she threatens me with a ripped heart, it's probably because I can survive it'_.

The prospect of having his heart crushed and torn out, wasn't a particularly attractive one. But the idea that he could survive that kind of damage could have its uses, _'Even if it's yet another thing I can add to the "inhuman dog" pile'_, he added with bitterness. No matter what he did, it seemed that Artid's proto-hunter initiative never stopped being a success. He calmed his mounting anger and self-disgust by reasoning that he would make sure to show the scientist how much of a success his experiment had been once he got his hands on him.

_'That's an old line. And again, that's implying you find him first, pal.'_ a familiar voice said.

His next breath stayed stuck in his throat at the sound of that voice.

He closed his eyes, took in a deep inspiration, and, releasing it, opened them to look up at the uneven rock ceiling, uncaring of the cool inquisitive feeling at the back of his head, nor of the slight curious tilt of the head from the feeding Dark Huntress.

It figured his ghosts would choose this kind of time to come back and haunt him.

_'Shut up. You didn't even have a mouth left when he was done with you.'_ he answered the specter tiredly, unwilling to turn his gaze and acknowledge the apparition that he knew only existed in his mind.

Yet there, floating at the right edge of his vision, arms and legs crossed as he laid back lazily against the wall, short brown hair cut short as was standard in the military, was the specter of corporal Delvin Malory, still wearing that same arrogant smile that had landed him as many girls as it had landed him problems. Acting like he hadn't a care in the world about his half rotten face. Or the shred under-suit through which holes he could see his wounds festering.

_'Aw come on'_ the vision laughed, strips of flesh shredding along his jaw as he did so, unhealthy, yellowish blood dripping down his neck _'My old friend Uxyal finally found himself a girl that won't die on him as easily as all the others did. How could I not come give my congratulations ?'_ He kept on laughing, even as the decay started reaching his eyes, the once ever joyous orbs deflating and festering in their orbits, the shaking of his shoulders only stopping as he turned to look at him.

_'Say,'_ he continued, his face lit up with the lopsided expression he had when making one of his his dubious jokes, _'what should we call her ? Laqshiz replacement number five...? Or is it six? I never got to check out if Marna counted or not. Though, I suppose I'll get my chance now, won't I ?'_ the ghost said as it finally turned to look at him with those now hollow orbits.

Sylux's jaw tightened as yet another vision flashed before his eyes, still staring resolutely at the stone ceiling, this time a vaguely female body, skin blistered, blood vessels burst out and half-cauterized, as if she had been cooked from inside. The crushed stumps where the legs and arms should usually be completed a picture that would have had its rightful place in the most gruesome works of horror.

_'Would you like to guess why...?'_ the vision continued nonchalantly, an eyebrow raised as he gave him a smile that would've made him look mischievous if the bloody teeth and the decaying flesh of his face hadn't turned it into a disturbing mess.

The spec ops soldier turned bounty hunter closed his eyes as his breath quickened, but doing so only made the details of the ghost's acidic burns stand out even more against the blackness.

Then the vision clapped its hands, and with unnecessary pomp and an explosion of laughter delivered the punchline of its morbid joke with open arms _'Because death checked us both in, Simons ! Got it ? Death checked us both _in _!'_

And the vision laughed.

And kept laughing.

Until its jaw fell on the floor, bloody and rotten. Yet even then he kept on laughing, his blackened and dried up tongue lolling in the air as it dripped more yellowish blood onto the floor.

And all the while a burning hatred grew inside of Sylux. Hatred for Artid. Hatred for the death of his squad and his powerlessness to stop it. Hatred for the Federation that had betrayed them. For Aran, for the Chozo and the dreams of power they inspired. For every craven politician, every amoral scientist, every arrogant higher-ups and every one of their entitled pawns.

Hatred that made him forget where he was.

And with whom.

When he finally noticed the cold sensation that spread into his mind like a flashlight his reaction was swift and brutal.

His face morphed into a bestial snarl as his eyes snapped open to her hidden face with a burning gaze, kicking her out of his mind by blinding her sight with the flames of his rage, willing them to flood her and burn her into a charred corpse as his armored fist flew for her wound, intent on shredding open what only been recently mended.

Time seemed to slow down, as the light from her visor thinned dangerously.

On the battlefield of the minds and against this particular opponent, he found himself outclassed by several orders of magnitude. Her riposte came as cold and methodical as a knife to head, splitting his thoughts apart and pushing down deeper and deeper with the strength of a hydraulic press, snuffing the flames of his blinding anger and pushing them back into his own mind. Her clawed hand opened and closed violently inside of him, shredding through his lung like paper, the sharp pain and mouthful of blood a single and last warning of what would happen should he resist.

He paid it no heed.

The tendrils on his back grew exponentially and resorbed violently, the shotgun like impact devouring the stone like butter in a resounding crash as the phazon flooded his system, this time bypassing his blood vessels entirely and circumventing the leeching palm of the Dark huntress.

His body jerked up instantly his fist finding the hole in her armor even as he felt her hand violently rip away his heart, the impact from his augmented punch sending her flying at the other end of the cave, where she back-flipped mid-air and smoothly landed in a crouch, arm-cannon at the ready, as she let go of his now crushed and bloody vital organ to protect her abdomen with her hand.

The series of actions hadn't lasted more than some fractions of a second, yet he was already up on his feet with his gun in his hands and his left upper ribs jutting out of his chest around a bloody fist sized hole that held his heart mere moments before, the nanites already starting to close the wound and regrowing the missing tissue as his genetically modified and phazon augmented body worked to provide the base material for the missing heart, blood vessels contracting and dilating on their own to make up for the lack of central irrigation.

The bones of his ribs were being quickly chipped away and regrown in their proper place as the skin around the wound rapidly closed to avoid foreign objects impeding the regeneration underneath. All the while he could feel the phazon in his system being quickly consumed, the burst of strength fading fast as the living mutagen was re-purposed to fuel his healing, forcing him to bend a knee to the ground, yet keeping his aim steady.

He didn't pull the trigger though, too busy trying to keep the coldness of her mind out of his own, and aware that a regular plasma bolt wouldn't even scratch her armor, regardless of its state. Conversely, he knew that she wouldn't pull the trigger herself until she absolutely had to. No matter how little phazon was actually needed for a shot, she wouldn't waste a single drop until she was fully healed.

And considering how their mental joust was going, she probably wouldn't have to.

He grunted as he struggled to keep her cold, sharp presence out of his mind, in vain. For several seconds they stayed like this, weapons pointed at each other as sweat dripped from his forehead while he attempted to contain her irrepressible assault, a steady shivering starting to overcome him as physical consequences began to manifest, an intangible frost stealing the heat from his body and slowly freezing his limbs.

He needed to change tactics, and fast.

The mental image of Feldings falling forward as he tried to kick open an unlocked door in boot camp flashed before his eyes, giving him an idea. _'You want to come in?'' _he thought with gritted teeth as he gathered the most painful and hateful thoughts he could think of at the moment and brought them at the forefront of his mind, _'Well then, welcome to my hell.'_

And he pulled her in.

He threw everything he had at her.

Memories of old wounds, phantom sensations of broken bones, the feeling of defeat, the anger, the hate, the impotence and the self-disgust. Everything remotely hurtful Sylux had at hand he threw at her, focusing the entirety of his attention on them, keeping her locked within his own perceptions.

Yet if any of that had an effect on her, she didn't show any sign of it, his piercing glare leaving her indifferent, as he felt her take his open invitation and dig in as deep as he had allowed her to.

Several moments passed as he took her through a senseless jumble of memories, his eyes never leaving hers as he felt her looking in with inquisitiveness at the few elements that she thought relevant while discarding the other ones. The pressure that had initially been pushing at his mind now feeling more like mildly cold water running at the back of his head, her thought cooling his own with their indifferent calm as his breathing evened.

The lack of blood in his mouth and the feeling of his own heart beating again pulled back his attention to the material world. Without taking his eyes off of her, he made a brief inquiry through his neural interface, which informed him that the healing process was finished. Eyes still aligned with the sights of his gun, he passed a hand on his now pristine chest, processing the time he had needed to recover from what, by all accounts, should have been a fatal wound. Even for him.

Six seconds and forty-seven milliseconds.

The cool presence made itself known again as the Dark Huntress considered the same thought, with apparent satisfaction, before retiring to the edge of the place in his mind where their bond usually started. Her arm-cannon lowered as she stood up again, her hand still protecting her stomach wound as he followed her movements with the cross-hairs of his gun. However once this done, she contented herself to stay still, merely giving off the sense that she was waiting for him.

He snarled briefly, as he realized that he had played right into her hands, showing her enough to satisfy her curiosity while being forced to calm down. And while he may, in another life, have been appreciative of the latter fact, the former was thoroughly unwelcome.

"Stay out of my mind," he snapped at her, giving her another snarl, something that she didn't seem to deign worthy of a retort, forcing him to take a deep inspiration as his eyes narrowed, biting back the surge of anger her indifference brought on, least he lost control of himself again.

His finger still twitched once around the trigger, the weight of the weapon in his hand, tempting him to use it.

He cared very little about her being able to look into his present thoughts and emotions, even though he would very much prefer her being unable to do so at all. To use his ghosts and the mental weakness they brought to manipulate him, on the other hand, was something else entirely. An offence that very few of the people stupid enough to actually attempt had survived.

Rancor filled him as the still sharp memories of being used as a lab rat reverberated with her trick, Artid's face superposing briefly with her helmet as he announced whether or not the results of the latest test would earn painkillers to the few of his surviving squad-mates.

He took great care to focus solely on this repressed anger, still fuming as he applied himself to block whatever window she had into his superficial thoughts, dissimulating his next moves. If she wanted to play the indifferent manipulator, then he would provide her with an acrid taste of her own medicine.

He got up with an annoyed grunt, his legs finally able to support him as the phazon in his system slowly replenished. Not turning his burning glare away from her as he did, he took meticulous care into feeding his rancor and his distrust as his eyes searched in vain for whatever hid behind the pale blue glow.

He slowly lowered his weapon and turned his open back to her, still keenly aware of the armor clad predator behind him, making a show of taking a look at the wall against which he had been resting only moments before, angling his body towards the mouth of the corridor from which he had entered their current hideout, as if intent on getting out right afterwards, his new heart beating with strength and calm, his senses alert.

What he saw on the wall nevertheless made him take a small moment to fully assess the damage he had involuntarily caused. His eyes darted across the stone, or more accurately what was left of it, keeping his ears wary of the slightest sound in the cave, yet purposefully focusing his attention on the hum of the small field generator.

Of the rocky surface where his back had rested, there only subsisted a horizontal crater, which looked very much like a tree or a flurry of lightning strikes had been stuck branches first into the stone and emptied out, leaving only a crumbling mold behind.

It had been a long time since he had last lost control in such a violent way, the events of that last occurrence not something that he wanted to reminisce with his bait still waiting to be taken. However the fact still remained that back then, his outbursts hadn't been fueled by the most energy potent substance in the known universe. He tsked in annoyance. That was something that he would have to actually watch out for from now on. He couldn't afford to randomly cause this kind of destruction each time his demons got the better of him.

A clicking sound, a rush of air and the glimpse of a movement at the edge of his vision were the only warnings he had that his plan had worked, her hand flying inhumanly fast for his exposed back, the extended claws of her armored hand ready to pierce through flesh and bone again.

However this time he was more than prepared.

Time seemed to slow again, his perceptions growing ten times sharper as the nano-machines amped his synaptic activity, modified adrenaline kickstarting his enhanced muscles cells into following the rhythm. Whirling around while crouching, he took hold of her wrist with his free hand, pulling her forward as he jabbed the barrel of his gun in the hole of her armor, pushing her upward and pulling the trigger as her feet left the ground, using both the recoil from the constrained blast and her own momentum to project her into the air with a burst of strength.

Two other, near point blank shots hit the exposed translucent membrane of her kin, leaving light scorch marks as he let go of her wrist. A burst of cold rage and indignation erupted at the back of his mind, as his aggressor began curling to roll into the air, her hand matching his own speed as it replaced itself protectively above her weak point, the slower arm-cannon powering up dangerously as it turned to align with his head.

Not fast enough. Two more plasma bolts flew from his gun, now held with both hands, one to a gap between the bottom of her hand and the edge of the breach and the other to the exact point in the middle of her visor, both catching her mid-air before he burst forward with a rush of purely phazon-enhanced speed, intending to reach her before she had the chance to take aim.

Yet the moment he started running was the one where she brought her arm-cannon to her chest with a burst of speed, her legs assisting in the movement as she started to flip on herself mid-air, intent on catching herself in a backflip landing again, the acrobatic performance seeming unreal for a being with the kind of heavy armor she wore. A move that he didn't intend on letting her finish.

His armored fist caught her in the middle of the back, forcing her to land in a crouch and dig her claws into the ground to absorb the force of the blow, leaving sharp wedges into the dust and stone as she was pushed backwards, immediately throwing her head back as she avoided the blow coming from his left knee and aimed at her helmet, the edge of both armors brushing against each other.

He followed with a kick down using the same leg that he had raised, one that she failed to completely dodge as her right shoulder and weapon slammed into the ground, lifting a cloud of dust as his armored boot came down on her arm. He had far from won though, as she curled in on herself, raising both knees to block the next gunshot aimed at her wound. Her own armor easily tanked the damage as she uncoiled her legs faster than he could move, catching him in the stomach and sending him sliding backwards in the dust.

He fixed her visor with a stoic face as he fired three times again, the plasma dispersing on the back of her black armor again as she put both her hand and weapon on the ground faster than he could pull the trigger, projecting herself backwards and into yet another backflip the second her boots touched the ground, landing upright with her wound protected again and the tip of her angular canon aimed at his head once more.

Time resumed its normal course as they faced each other once more, their positions at the reverse of what they had been mere moments prior, and again, with neither pulling the trigger. Him because he knew that his shots would be nothing more than a distraction unless he managed to hit her weak spot, his attention riveted on her, ready to act at the slightest hint of movement.

Her because she was acutely aware that there was a chance, however slight, that the sensors of the surveillance post above would pick up on her weapon's energy signature the very second she attempted to blast the limbs away from the body of the human, regardless of the radioactive storm that she could feel raging on the surface.

The cold rage and indignation born of his scheme, and her failure to discern it, helped her ignore the thrill that came with the fight, and what it said of his worth as her Seed, but were failing to completely squash them either. Even the sting of the added insult of having their positions reversed failed to completely overcome the reluctant respect at the feat, and the nagging hunger for a fight with a worthy opponent. Her cold methodical mind reasserted itself again as she shifted their battle to a mental one again, her unseen eyes piercing his cobalt blue ones a she pushed a relentless offensive inside of his mind, bent on punishing him for his actions.

However this time Sylux did not try to fight the freezing presence invading his thoughts. Rather, he ignored it.

_'Payback'_ he thought, his eyes searched the opacity of her visor, focusing on making the rancor born of her trick resonate with her own, rubbing in the fact that, were their positions reversed, she would have done the same, a flash of cold hatred and spike of ice brutally driving itself in his mind as he obviously hit a sore spot, nearly making him flinch, even as he could feel a part of her coldly acknowledging his statement.

"You understand that, right?" he continued aloud, using his own voice as a distraction from her painful invasion. "You want to feed? I'm fine with that. I want that stuff out of my system as much as you want it in yours." He couldn't see her eyes, but he could almost feel them narrow at these words, the underlying implication making the light from her cannon intensify slightly and her weapon move slightly upwards, in the universal language for _'be very, very careful with what you will say next...'_ as the cold started to become almost physical again.

"...But if you want us to get out of there without bringing the entire Federation army down on us, then we'll need some basic rules." he said with a meaningful glare as the light from her visor thinned ever so slightly, sharp, cold talons still burying deeper and deeper in his head. He continued quickly, not intending to waste what small shred of patience she had left "You want something from me? You ask first. You want to know something from me? You ask first. You want to see something that is too deep in my mind for you to reach? You. Ask. First." he said, his voice steely and unyielding, even under her assault.

"... And only after I've either refused or failed to answer can you consider yourself entitled to take it by force." he finished, his voice and gaze still firm as frostburns started eating at his senses.

This made her pause, her icy claws stopping their relentless progression in his mind, yet not withdrawing either, as a mix of slight confusion and cold skepticism emanated from her, the edge of her weapon dropping ever so slightly as he could vaguely feel her give some consideration to his words. He could almost picture her slowly raising an eyebrow behind that helmet of hers as she searched for the logic behind his words.

"No, I am not stupid enough to believe you will simply accept 'No' as an answer," he replied to her wordless question with the same glare, slowly lowering his gun as he did so, calmly replacing it in its holster at his hip without taking his eyes off of her, her cannon still pointed at his head, her thoughts hounding each one of his own, watching for any potential trap or sudden move "But if you choose not to" he continued with a dangerous tone "then we will be wasting useless time and energy fighting. And extend an open invitation to those who want to see us both dead."

He summoned a mental picture of Aran and of the Federation fleet as they launched their final assault on Phaaze, underlining his point as he could feel the sharp claws of her mind slowly recede from his, feeling her give consideration to his logic, weighting it against his previous offence and their odds when faced with their enemies in their present state.

He then spread his arms to the sides, still matching her impassable gaze with her own. "If you want to bury your hand in my heart and feed, that's fine by me. But you do it from the _front_ and you warn me _before_ you start doing it." he said, knowing that he was toeing a very thin line. He then narrowed his eyes, a dangerous flame burning at the bottom of them "And if, _if_, I get lost inside my mind again, then you have the right to kick me out of it..."

"... But you. Do. _Not_. Follow me there."

He very much doubted she would take any kind of order, nor tolerate someone trying to give her one. But the few reports he had read about her as Andrew Starosk described her as a coldly pragmatic being, one who didn't hesitate to sacrifice her own troops and followers to achieve her goals, and right now it was on that pragmatism that he was banking.

A bet that seemed to be paying, as the hum from her de-powering weapon faded, the power lines along it dimming as she slowly lowered it. He let out a sigh through his nose as he felt her slowly retire from his mind, his eyes still attentively watching her every move. The possibility of her just straight up ignoring his words a going for his throat was a very real one, but it was a risk he was willing to take.

"Also," he added as her weapon finally came to rest parallel to her leg, prompting another unseen raised eyebrow "if you want me to give you more, then showing me how to do it might actually be a good idea." This, at least got a response out of her, her head tilting to the side with a sudden interest, her gaze pausing before going down then up his body with a scrutiny that he was sure heralded nothing good for him...

_'Oooh, getting it on with the lady already, aren't you ? Well, I guess you were remade for each-other...'_

_'Shut up, Delvin...'_

_'Oh come on, old friend. Switch tunes a little, would you ?'_

Ignoring the ghost's words, he watched on as the armor clad metroid impassibly walked up to him, coming to stand at one arm's length away from his still naked torso. Up close, he could see that she was only slightly smaller than he was, by an inch or so, the smooth half-organic, half-metallic design of her black armor coming in sharp relief to his now acute sight.

The veins of phazon that had once ran along its surface were now completely gone, only leaving smooth planes of black and clean lines of neon blue along her limbs and her helmet. A very dim glow emanated from the rigged edges of her armor, and on each of her shoulder guards he could see a trio of equally dim, short, rift-like patterns evenly spaced around a single blue dot.

A voice in his mind told him that now would be a good time to put his other arm down the sleeve hanging behind him, zip up his under-suit and re-engage his own armor in full, but he highly doubted said armor was made to withstand a million or so of phazon tendrils that could eat though stone like a vibroknife ate through butter. Especially if said tendrils came from the inside of the suit.

Any further pondering was interrupted when her hand started to move from its protective spot, a sharp and cold mental tug called his attention back to her thin triangular visor, making him understand in no uncertain terms that he had better be paying attention, or lose what little progress he made with her, with the potential threat and very graphic mental picture of the bloody arm-cannon sized hole he would get through the stomach should he try anything she did not like.

_'Aye, aye, ma'am'_ he thought sardonically, but nonetheless opened his mind to her as her palm came to rest above his heart once more, firmly pushing him backwards until his back was against the rock. He briefly took note of the still unrepaired state of her gauntlet, the smoothness of her membrane contrasting sharply with the jagged edges of the gap in the armor through which it pressed against his own skin, before another cold tug called him to order again.

However this time, his attention was pulled inwards rather than outwards. His eyes didn't move from her helmet, making sure to 'feel', so to speak every detail of what she was doing. He followed her trail as she called onto the phazon inside of him, reaching for the seeds inside of him responsible for converting matter into the radioactive mutagen, slowly decomposing the different command she gave them through what little influence she had over them and making sure he took note of each one as she prompted the tendrils of whitish blue to emerge from the surface of his skin, shaping them into the most efficient form for the job before making them bury into the stone and bring back their prize.

She started leeching the phazon immediately as she did this, but quickly stopped and receded from this mind. He paid special attention as she retraced her steps backwards, ethereal tendrils resorbing into his body as she pushed back to sleep what she referred to as 'gatherer seeds', if he understood the concept that she introduced into his mind right. He frowned as he realized that even at their lowest activity levels, the seeds still consistently produced an infinitesimal amount of phazon, which would have been both negligible and undetectable if his body hadn't been filled to the brim with them.

Before completely withdrawing back to her attach point into his mind, the humanoid metroid pulled his attention to a number of other 'seeds' and 'conduits', along with a few other concepts that showed him how the phazon was funneled through his body, either in it's pseudo-molecular form or it's energetic one, and then substituted itself to whatever energetic resources his body needed, the surplus stocked into his cells the same way normal molecule were. Only once those reserves were full did the phazon start its slow lethal aggregation, something that happened far too quickly as his body was unable to process it into either fat or bone, leaving it wandering into his system.

The next piece of knowledge was even more interesting, and one that came with a warning in the form of a claw lightly piercing his flesh, pulling him from his thoughts and to her helmet again. But from what he understood, by forcing all of his conduits to channel the phazon into its energetic form, he would be able to trigger what was known in the army as an "innate" or "organic" hypermode, consequently super charging his body and mind, at the cost of quickly burning through his reserves, something that would damage said conduits and potentially burn his body from the inside should he try to channel too much phazon at once. Still, considering the kind of quantity her mind imprinted on his as a limit, he very much doubted that the occasion would come.

Yet there was still a catch. Once said reserves would be empty, the gatherer seeds would irrepressibly become active and start to draw on every material and energy source available to sustain it. That, potentially, meant his own flesh, if he were to be stupid enough to try and keep hypermode active for too long within the void of space. And given how innate hypermode was known to remove inhibitions and induce psychotic behaviors, that was something that immediately made it onto the "do not attempt under any circumstances" list.

Hypermode would have to wait until he could get his hands on a custom-made PED, or found a way to fill the currently dematerialized tank of his actual suit, something that actually seemed to be the subject of the next set of ideas and mental pictures that she put into his head for him to make sense of.

Said 'lesson', so to speak, was on how to use the phazon tendrils to redirect the phazon extracted by the gatherer seeds outside before it was assimilated by his body, a lesson for which she was unable to provide an example for, beyond giving him an approximate clue of where to start with, as she had never needed to do so. And since her hand was still on his chest as opposed to buried inside of it between two broken ribs, he guessed that this would be his first exercise.

He still raised an eyebrow at her, dubiously wondering why she would teach him something that could be used to empty himself of the mutagen without her help, the only response he got in return, because she had of course heard his thought, being a flicker of amusement and the given incentive to try.

Sighing, he closed his eyes and focused. With his neural implant capable of translating his requests to the phazon-enhanced nanites into his system, and give him accurate data about what happened into his body in return, putting her concepts into words became far more easier. Prompting the white-blue tendrils to emerge with a given purpose came literally as easily as thinking about it, and the feedback as he tentatively tried to purge himself from his own phazon quickly put an end to his hopes of definitive independence, prompting another flicker of amusement from her mind as he bit back a curse.

He opened his eyes with an annoyed glare, which was again met by the opacity of her visor. Any attempt at extracting the phazon in his system without seeking exterior material first instantly caused the gatherer seeds to draw on his body's reserves. His body's actual nutritive reserves. _'And'_, he thought, _'if I push it too far, probably my vital ones too. All to answer the demand and spread itself. Nevermind whether I'm running empty or full...'_

In short, the only two ways he would have to stale his production would be to either burn it through innate hypermode, in conditions that would probably be lethal to begin with, or, as she had already been doing, to have one the most dangerous being in the galaxy leech it from him. A qualification that was only met with cold, factual acknowledgement, and a reminder that she was still waiting.

Sighing through his nose again, he made the tendrils emerge from his back with ease and they quickly started to spread through the stone in a tree-like fashion, with his back as the top of trunk, a smaller patch of them emerging around the Dark Huntress' gauntlet, who immediately started leeching the now far more abundant quantities to phazon that he was able to gather, the now familiar sting of her energy drain on his chest as she took along a steady amount from his own ever filling reserves.

He kept feeding her like this for probably five minute or so, according to his internal clock, during the first two of which of it he was able to see the hole in her suit close completely, and feel the one on her palm do the same. Three minutes in and there wasn't a trace of damage across her armor, four and the glow from the lines and rigged edges of her armor, along with the one from her chest plate, had become a vibrant one.

At the end of the fifth minute she seemed to be enveloped into a thin, blue aura, that slowly faded as she instructed him to stop drawing from the stone. Something that he had no problem complying with, tendrils instantly resorbing and fading away from his skin, only leaving slightly glowing phazite on the edges of the cave's new extension, which he could see from the corner of vision.

He took a closer look at it, turning around as she removed her hand, still unable to contain the feeling of bitterness that always passed through him each time his body became more powerful or more resistant. An ever present testament of Dr Artid's skills, and of the blood with which he paid his progress. He briefly played with the idea of filling the tank of his armor as he put his still naked arm into the sleeve of the undersuit, zipping it up, but quickly discarded it.

The stone and the radioactive storms above might have hidden their action from the observation post, but in space and with the kind of sensors these stations were usually fitted with, an entire backpack of pure liquid phazon would not go unnoticed, even with his ship's cloaking abilities, which while they were more than sufficient to escape the notice of the Federation, were nowhere near those of the Delano Seven, his own ship.

He re-engaged his armor with a flash, the familiar HUD appearing above his vision and syncing with his weapons. His eyes looked to the mini-map that appeared in the top right of his vision, taking careful note of the fact that his suit's sensors detected no lifeforms or energy signature in the cave beyond his own and the remnants of phazite on the wall.

A quick status report on his gun, riffle and the vibroknife strapped to his left thigh passed in the middle of his vision, before letting place to a yellow arrow that appeared on the left side of his vision, indicating the position of his rifle. He turned around and walked up to it, crouching to pick it up, and put it on his back where the magnetic locks kept it in place.

He sighed as he stood up, pausing for a moment to look at the cave's other occupant, who seemed to be waiting for him at the mouth of the corridor by which he had came here, watching him impassibly. Already having an inkling of what she was expecting him to go along with next, he spoke up.

"I am going to take an educated guess and say that your next objective is to take over that orbital monitoring station and have me start corrupting this planet so it can be turned into a 'Source', isn't it ?" he said warily. She answered with a mental jab of approval, confirming his theories, and adding in the brief vision of a small flock of phazon metroids and of her feeding directly from the planet, leaving him free to go wherever he wanted, so long as he made no obstruction to whatever future plans she had in mind.

He considered her response with a frown. The part about her wanting to turn this planet into a 'Source' hadn't been a hard guess, and made sense from a tactical standpoint. Oormine II was categorized as a class eleven wasteland, the near unpredictable radioactive storms that continuously battered the surface of small planet making it entirely inhospitable to any lifeforms, and given the time would severely damage any kind of equipment. It also prevented any kind of scanning, entirely obscuring the inside of the planet from sensors.

Last but not least, it was located in the same star system as Talon IV and the slowly re-aggregating asteroid field that had once been the planet Zebes. The important part about this would be the fact that, as the result of the events that unfolded on both worlds, the entire system would be classified as a black zone by the Federation, its existence classified, its coordinates removed from any galactic map and kept to an absolute need-to-know basis.

Which meant that if they subverted the station responsible for monitoring the system, nobody, up or down the chain of command, would go looking for them here, and any unauthorized entry into the system would be legally warranting an immediate take-down by the system's automated defenses network. But they would have to get there first.

And then they'd have to somehow find metroids? And phazon ones at that?

Trying to pierce the opacity of her visor with an interrogative gaze yielded no more result the doing the same with a stone, the Dark Hunter immovable as she silently prompted him to get going, her stance relaxed and her weapon pointed slightly above the ground, the black and neon glow from her armor contrasting against the stone wall behind her.

"Fine. Let's go to my ship. We'll talk more there" he said, giving her an annoyed glance, and seeing no point in wasting any more time, passed by her and entered the stone corridor, starting their trek to the surface. He only paused briefly, looking behind him from the corner of his eyes as he heard no footsteps behind him, but resumed walking soon afterwards, trying to ignore the fact that there was a completely silent armored metroid lazily floating after him, her boots an inch in the air above the floor.

_'Necessity sure make for strange bedfellows...'_

_'See ? I told you, remade for each other. Now you'll just have to find an actual bed to get... fellows... with her'_

His eye twitched in annoyance as the ghost's laughter echoed in his head once more.


End file.
